Lost Again
by abelard
Summary: She’ll always come back. That’s what he believes, because he must. LeeKara


She's lost again. She often is, Lee thinks when thoughts actually manage to form coherently in his brain. Starbuck likes playing all by herself every now and then, and has wandered off on several occasions, much to everyone's dismay, either chasing down a rogue Cylon ship or getting chased herself onto some rocky planet surface or following the orders of a dying leader who has a mad faith. Lee has come to the conclusion that something in her likes being lost, likes being on her own time, making her own discoveries, once in a while.

This is different. She's only been missing since yesterday, but this time people say they saw her killed. Five people, to be exact. Hotdog and Kat are two of them; the rest are brand-frakking-new nuggets. But to Lee, they're all new, they're all so green, even Hotdog and Kat, who by now have seen more action than ninety percent of Lee's Academy classmates ever did. Despite their experience, they are young and raw and barely trained. Starbuck did a great job but she had such limited time to teach them; they know only what they need to and no more.

What they don't know a damn thing about, those nuggets and until-very-recently-nuggets, is ground combat. Five days ago, Starbuck led them on a foraging mission, accompanying some civilians from the agri-ships, looking for new seedlings on a planet they thought might have some. Twelve civilians, six Viper pilots, which seemed excessive but five of them had no combat training and Starbuck and Apollo both thought it might be nice to give them a training mission that was easy. No enemy fire, a simple directive, lots of opportunity to show them how to take cover, where the enemy might approach from, how to fire your weapon in different kinds of terrain, at different kinds of light.

Cylon centurions showed up and opened fire on the landing party just as the civilians had taken the last of the seedlings they wanted. Two of the nuggets headed out in front of the civs, two others plus Starbuck brought up the rear, firing behind them at the toasters as they ran. Starbuck was dead last, of course, she'd never let one of the pilots under her command take the most vulnerable position. Kat said she knows for sure that Starbuck was shot twice: once in the leg and once in the shoulder. "Those are not critical injuries," said Lee when Kat said that in the debriefing. "She was not mortally wounded," Lee said very insistently. Kat was crying when she replied that those were the two wounds she saw clearly, but there may have been more.

They found a low ditch behind a giant fallen tree, and Starbuck hunkered down in the ditch and fired over the thick trunk, screaming at the civs and the others to Run, run, get back to the Raptor and go! Hot Dog crouched down with her, said he wouldn't leave her behind, and when he and Starbuck took turns shooting at the enemy Hot Dog said it looked like there were two dozen of them at least. Starbuck said very distinctly (Lee asked him to repeat it four times), "They got the artery in my leg. I am not going to make it out of here." Then, while Hot Dog covered for her, she yanked the dog tags off her neck and the ring off her thumb and shoved them into the front pocket of Hot Dog's flight suit. "Give these to Apollo," she said, "and give me your weapon, and GO!"

Hot Dog handed over his gun and left her. Starbuck stood, he said, and fired so fiercely from both barrels that the Cylons seemed momentarily confused: "Maybe they thought we had reinforcements," Hot Dog said. He ran and the Raptor was in sight and he looked over his shoulder and that's when he saw the explosion. The others saw it, too. The Cylons had obviously mortared the spot where the ditch was, where the fallen tree was, where Starbuck was. Hot Dog and the other pilots and the civs made it to the Raptor and into space with Cylons firing on them just seconds too late.

Hot Dog tried to hand over to Apollo what Starbuck had given him and that was when Lee lost it.

"How dare you leave her there! How dare you let her sacrifice herself for you!" Lee yelled in the younger pilot's face, hauling Hot Dog up out of his chair by the front of his torn and dusty flight suit. There was blood on the suit too, Lee realized as he stared at the material up close. It was _her_ blood, from when she shoved her personal belongings into Hot Dog's pockets. "Don't you know," Lee said deliberately, with all the fury of Kobol, "that she was worth all of you put together? And you let her give herself up for _you_!"

Colonel Tigh yanked Lee off and yelled, "That's _enough_, Captain!" Lee was already opening the door when he turned back briefly and saw Hot Dog sobbing – _sobbing_ – slumped back in his chair. Lee didn't say another word. He left and clutched Starbuck's things in his right hand so tightly they'd make marks in his palm. He hoped the marks would be permanent, or at least would cut the skin and draw blood.

Starbuck's been lost for only a day, but five people saw her killed. Plus the twelve who realized there was an explosion, but didn't know till later that the lieutenant who'd been the leader of their party was the target of the blast. That was seventeen people who could vouch that Starbuck was dead. And there was only Lee, and some part of his father – only one and one-half people, at most – who thought she was still alive.

It's not like when she was on the deserted planet and they could look for her. There are Cylons down there, and now the Cylons know the Galactica is nearby, and it is only a matter of time, maybe mere moments, before a base star appears and tries to blow the fleet away. The fleet needs to jump right now. It needed to jump one hour ago, when the Raptor first landed and the pilots told their story, but the Commander has not given the order and Lee knows it is because half of his father still believes. Lee believes. He doesn't believe she is somewhere safe, or that she is coming back on her own as she has done when she's gotten lost before. But he believes there is still breath in her body. And if they jump away now, they will never recover her, and that breath will go out.

Lee can't think well right now. _Starbuck is lost and we need to find her_ is the extent of his thoughts. He doesn't let himself think her name, her real name. He puts on a flight suit and heads for the bay and tells the Chief to ready his Mark VII and prepares to go back down to that planet with his sidearm and his faith in Starbuck. His father anticipates this and has MPs block him from climbing into the cockpit. When the MPs bring him to CIC, Lee says, "If I don't go now, she'll –" and his father cuts him off and says, "She was hit in the artery. She would have bled to death even if she somehow made it to the Raptor. She didn't want to go out like that. She made the best decision available, for herself and for the group. I would have done the same." And Lee thinks, _Oh. I've lost that half. _Now Lee is the only one who believes.

His father begins to shake after he finishes speaking. Lee cannot bring himself to console his father. Yet again, when one of their family dies, Lee and his father are totally at odds.

The fleet makes the jump fifteen minutes later. That is when Lee begins to go mad.

It happens first when he is briefing the pilots the next day. Lee has not slept since the Raptor came back without Starbuck. When it is time for the daily pilots' briefing, Lee hears them sniffling and sees them sad and despondent, shifting in their seats. _Fools_, he thinks. _They've given up on her._ His next thought is that he has to give up on her now, too, because the fleet has jumped and even if she binds the wound in her shoulder, in her leg (_she could have been wrong, or she could have been lying to Hot Dog_), even if she survived the mortar blast and found safe shelter and managed to get inside a Raider like she did one of the other crazy times she was lost, she will not know where to find the fleet. They have left her behind.

Lee finds himself saying to the pilots, "I am not going to give a maudlin memorial service. No one despised maudlin more than Starbuck, and I am not going to speak of her...her..." Lee is stumped for words. "...her absence in ways that would be highly offensive to her. I just want to say," and here he made himself look at Hot Dog and say what he needed to say, even if he didn't feel it, "that Starbuck told me repeatedly this was the best team of pilots she'd ever seen. And those of you that she trained: she said she was prouder of you than any nuggets she'd ever trained in the past." Then a noise comes from the doorway of the briefing room, and Lee lifts his eyes and –

And there she is. Bloody and limping and looking like complete shit. But she is standing, and just vaguely smiling, and she brushes her long dirty sweaty blonde bangs out of her eyes with the hand of her uninjured arm, and she says to the group, "So eager to get rid of me, huh? Giving funeral speeches already?"

Lee runs – races – to the doorway to greet her, embrace her as he tends to do after she returns from being lost, and he is reaching out when he realizes

that there is no one standing in front of him. He looks around; the pilots are gaping at him. They are aghast. Lee realizes he was smiling a second ago. They all saw him charge towards the entrance, arms outstretched, grinning. Trying to embrace a ghost.

Lee excuses himself and leaves. He vows to get it together before the next day's debriefing. He can't let this happen again.

He thinks they are committing a crime. It's murder. _She's down there, back on that planet, and we've doomed her to die_, he thinks. He can feel her breathing, feel her hurting. His shoulder hurts where hers does (he tries his best to estimate where the bullet entered, from Kat's description). His thigh hurts, too. He knows she's in pain, but she's tougher than anyone, she can fight it. Even now, she's finding a way to fight, to survive. That's what she does. She lives.

Lee wakes up – he didn't know he fell asleep, but he wakes up in his rack – and he is calling her name. Her real name, the one he thought he wouldn't himself use until she was back, safely, in front of him again. "Kara!" he's shouting as he wakes. "Kara!" It takes him a moment before he realizes he's woken up the other pilots with his frantic cries. He doesn't even remember what he was dreaming. He almost regrets he doesn't remember. Maybe in his dreams he saw her face.

Lee loses consciousness the next day. He is just walking, just getting from one place to another. He doesn't really care about starting points or destinations anymore. He just knows he still has things to do, duties to execute, paperwork to complete, reports to make, orders to give. He is so good at these things by now that he can do them without conscious thought. But then consciousness decides to desert him completely.

He wakes up in Life Station and is ashamed. He asks Cottle how many people saw him get carried to Life Station, and Cottle says it doesn't matter one damn. Cottle is stymied; there is nothing wrong with Lee, physically. Lee gets up as if Cottle said he was free to go. Cottle is an old man, and smokes; he doesn't have the strength or energy to restrain the CAG from going back on the job.

That night, Lee wonders if he passed out at the exact moment that Starbuck died. He doesn't know why else he would have collapsed. He never does, even when roaring drunk. He usually remembers their drunken rages better than Starbuck does; she does things under the influence, and doesn't recall them the next morning. He considers it something of a point of pride that he has never once taken advantage of her when she's been too drunk to know what she's doing.

No, Lee doesn't just faint. But he's heard sometimes a person will wake up in the middle of the night for no reason, and later they discover that was the instant that their spouse was killed. Maybe with Lee it worked in the reverse – instead of waking up while sleeping, he collapsed while awake?

_That is stupid mystical crap_, he tells himself. _That is lunacy and sentimental bullshit, people being able to tell when their loved one dies. People being able to feel it in their bones, or whatever the frak it's supposed to be_.

_Besides_, he thinks, _Starbuck is not dead_. But the second he thinks it, he feels for the first time in his heart and gut that it might not be true.

Will he someday, maybe even someday soon, tell himself, _This is the day I have to realize she's dead?_ But what in the frak will he do then? He doesn't want to see himself then. He can't even begin to guess what he will become.

The worlds have ended for so many people. But for him, there is still a future, as long as Starbuck inhabits this galaxy. He did not know that's what he believed until now, when he faces the possibility that he may live the rest of his life without ever seeing her again.

Lee turns a corner, he realizes he is heading to the hangar, probably intended to do some minor repairs to his Viper. He pulls a tool cart towards him and picks up a wrench and begins to loosen a bolt. _Even if she survived the blast, survived her wounds, how would she get to us? She could never get to me, she won't know where I've gone. Where I am. She could try and try, and never find me_, he thinks. He is just now realizing that it is not a distant possibility that he will one day have to accept losing her. He is just now understanding that Starbuck is lost forever. And someday, he will have to admit it to himself.

He stares for a long time at the bolt in his palm and the Chief comes over and lays a hand on his shoulder, looks concerned. Lee straightens and clears his throat and moves away from the Chief's sympathetic hand and eye. The Chief's pity seems only to deepen as Lee backs away.

Lee is in his rack when he hears over the com that the FTL drive is spooling up for another jump. He doesn't know why his breath catches in his throat at the thought of a second jump. Some part of him thinks, _It'll be even harder for her to find us if we jump again_, and he knows it is ridiculous even as he thinks it. He tries to sleep but he feels like death. He feels like dying. He wonders if his reflexes will be slower the next time they engage with a couple of Raiders. Will he unconsciously try to get blown apart by Cylon fire because she is no longer here, and will never be here again? He hopes not. Well, some part of him hopes not. Because Starbuck would say that it's Lee's job to boost morale now that she can't, to train nuggets and make jokes and tell people they're doing well now that she can't. He doesn't want to think about that at all, the fact that in addition to having to accept that she's lost to him, he'll have to try to fill her shoes in some respects. Which will be undoable, of course. The day he accepts she is gone, he will want to be allowed to weep forever, and he will not be allowed to. He will never be allowed to mourn her, not really.

_Kara_, he calls out with his mind, because he is too weak now to stop himself from thinking her name. _Kara, Kara, Kara..._

A cry goes up somewhere. A general cry – the sound of people celebrating. What is there to cheer? Nothing, as far as Lee is concerned. The noise gets closer – more and more people calling out, shouting, with – joy. Triumph. _Shut up_, Lee thinks. _What the frak could it be?_ The noise gets louder and closer and the door to the barracks opens and the curtain to his rack is drawn back and –

And there she is. She's got her left arm in a sling and a bandage wrapped around her entire left thigh, and she's dirty as hell and smells like a sewer. Or like the insdie of a stolen Cylon raider. She perches on the edge of his mattress and gives him that cocky wide grin of hers and says, "Miss me?"

Lee says nothing. The entire pilot contingent is standing behind her, it seems, and the FTL jump is announced, and then it's announced the entire fleet jumped successfully, and Starbuck is still there and she says, "Got back here just in time; if you'd jumped again I wouldn't have found you," and people are asking her how the hell she found them after the first jump and she says something about being able to decode Cylon transmissions, thanks to the version of Boomer that's in the brig now, who has her uses Starbuck guesses, and she goes on about leaping out of the way of a mortar blast just in time and finding shelter on that godsforsaken planet just long enough to tend to her injuries and being wrong about getting hit in the artery and...

She's real. Seven minutes or so must have passed since she pulled back his curtain, sat until her hip was almost touching his arm. And she's still there. She's real. _You're alive_, he thinks. _You're here, you're alive_.

A future that didn't seem like any kind of future at all disappears from his mind, from his heart. She's here, she's back, and he has his reason to live. The nightmare is over.

"Well, aren't you going to say something, Captain?" she asks. She's happy and relieved to be back home, he can tell by the look on her face.

"Got lost again, huh?" he asks, and his voice sounds steady. The pilots standing behind Starbuck are staring at him intently. He knows, he can see on their faces, that they'll never mention to Starbuck how frakked up he was when she was gone; for that he's grateful. His voice doesn't betray any hint of the insanity he's been spiraling into since five pilots told him she was dead.

"Guess so. I tend to do that, don't I?" Starbuck replies.

Lee just nods.

"Well, I always find my way back again," she says.

Lee's face crumples as he begins to weep. With exhaustion, with relief, with desperation to beg her to _please, please, promise to always find your way back again, no matter what_. He turns his head just in time to hide his face from her; he buries his head in his thin pillow and wets the pillowcase with his silent tears. When he trusts himself to speak, he says, muffled by the pillow, "I haven't gotten much rest over the last couple days, Starbuck. Go party with the others and let me sleep, will you?"

She doesn't sound offended by his brush-off when she says, "Aye-aye, Sir," and shuts his curtains and rises, probably off to see Cottle before she goes back to being the center of everyone's gladness.

It's okay that she leaves, because she's back. _I knew it, I knew it_, Lee says to himself, his crying done. _She always comes back. She'll always come back_. That's what he believes, because he must.


End file.
